Category Archives: Curiosities

by | June 7, 2010 · 11:57 am

Haydn’s skull

After Haydn’s funeral in Vienna his former employer, Prince Esterházy, obtained permission to have the body exhumed and moved to Eisenstadt. The matter apparently then slipped his mind until, 11 years later, a distinguished visitor remarked to him that it was fitting that he possessed the composer’s remains.

Not wishing to contradict his guest’s assumption, Esterházy quickly arranged for the coffin to be brought to Eisenstadt; but when it was opened for identification, the horrified officials discovered a headless body—only Haydn’s wig remained. Inquiries led to the revelation that two students of phrenology had bribed the gravedigger and stolen the composer’s head a few days after the funeral.

Esterházy was furious, and demanded that the skull be returned, but efforts to claim it were thwarted when the wife of its keeper secreted it in her straw mattress and lay down on top of it, feigning illness. When Esterházy offered a bribe, he was given the skull of an old man, and this was placed in Haydn’s coffin. The composer’s skull was not reunited with his other remains until 1954.

This according to “An incongruous postlude” in Haydn: A creative life in music by Karl and Irene Geiringer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). For more on Haydn’s physiognomy, see this Bibliolore post.

Above, a drawing of the marble tablet—now lost—erected by Haydn’s devoted pupil Sigismund von Neukomm at the composer’s Viennese resting place in 1814 (click to enlarge). The inscription includes Haydn’s favorite quotation from Horace, non omnis moriar, set by Neukomm as a puzzle canon.

More posts about Haydn are here.

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by | June 1, 2010 · 7:57 am

Operatic degeneracy I

An anonymous pamphlet from around 1733 titled Do you know what you are about? or, A Protestant alarm to Great Britain rails against the egregious inroads that Roman Catholic degeneracy, not least in the form of Italian opera, were making in England.

Händel and Senesino are particularly singled out for “playing at the dog and bear, exactly like the two kings of Poland contending for the Empire of Doremifa” in contrast to the humble, hardworking John Gay, whose praiseworthy Beggar’s opera reached the stage only through his own admirable toil and steadfastness.

This according to William Charles Smith’s “Do you know what you are about?: A rare Handelian pamphlet”, an article in The music review no. 98 (2 April 1964, pp. 114–19); the issue, which honors the 70th birthday of the English librarian, bibliographer, and honorary curator of the Royal Music Library Cecil Bernard Oldman (1894–1969), is covered in our recently published Liber Amicorum: Festschriften for music scholars and nonmusicians, 1840–1966.

Above, a satirical depiction by John Vanderbank from around 1723 of Senesino, Francesca Cuzzoni, and Gaetano Berenstadt performing in a Händel opera (probably Flavio, re di Longobardi).

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by | May 17, 2010 · 11:39 am

Alphabetical impressionism

Bach’s use of a musical motive based on his name, B–A–C–H, is well known, and several other composers have used it in tributes to the Baroque master. As connoisseurs of French chamber music also know, Ravel made similar use of the technique of deriving musical material from a composer’s name in his Berceuse sur le nom de Gabriel Faure and Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn.

Far less known is the further use of this technique by both Debussy and Ravel in more enigmatically titled pieces. For example, several of their works bearing the words hommage or tombeau include musical material derived from the honoree’s name. Such formerly puzzling titles, which have led the curious on wild-goose chases in their attempts to understand what on earth the music had to do with the named composer, may now be understood as sly references to uses of this technique.

This according to “Widmungsstücke mit Buchstaben-Motto bei Debussy und Ravel” by Paul Mies, an essay included in Festschrift für Erich Schenk (Studien zur Musikwissenschaft: Beihefte der Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich, vol. 25 [1962], pp. 363–368); this journal issue dedicated to the Austrian musicologist Erich Schenk (1902–74) on the occasion of his 60th birthday is covered in our recently published Liber Amicorum: Festschriften for music scholars and nonmusicians, 1840–1966.

Below, Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin, one of the works discussed in the article.

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by | May 9, 2010 · 1:56 pm

Mangled Mozart

Mozart’s Entführung aus dem Serail was first performed in London at The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden on 24 November 1827. Stephanie’s libretto was translated into English and quite freely adapted, and one C. Kramer made numerous and inexplicable changes to the score, editing Mozart’s music, substituting his own numbers for some of the original ones, and adding entirely new numbers. None the wiser, audiences and critics received the mangled work with great enthusiasm.

This according to “The first performance of Mozart’s Entführung in London” by Alfred Einstein (1880–1952) in Essays on music (New York: W.W. Norton, 1956), a collection of his writings issued as a memorial volume; the book is covered in our recently published Liber Amicorum: Festschriften for music scholars and nonmusicians, 1840–1966.

Above, a nineteenth-century engraving depicting a production of the opera in London—perhaps the one that Einstein described. Below, Twyla Tharp and Milos Forman imagine the opera’s premiere in Amadeus.

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by | April 29, 2010 · 12:26 pm

Nonsense neumes

Built at the behest of Richard Beauchamp, 13th Earl of Warwick (1382–1439), the Beauchamp Chapel at the Collegiate Church of St Mary, Warwick, is a remarkable survival of fifteenth-century architecture, sculpture, and—above all—stained glass. These windows are well known to organologists for their depictions of instruments and performance practice; they also provide useful information about chant and polyphony in fifteenth-century England by preserving fragments of neumatic notation.

Over the centuries craftspeople have restored damaged windows, and, lacking the requisite musical training, they often left replacement staves blank; but in two cases nonsense neumes were devised, supplying consistent-looking décor that most observers would never suspect was counterfeit.

This according to Alexandra Buckle’s “Fit for a king: Music and iconography in Richard Beauchamp’s chantry chapel” (Early music XXXVIII/1 (2010), pp. 3–20).

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by | April 22, 2010 · 8:07 am

Comedy versus opera

Music was commonly introduced into French plays at least by the time of Molière, but after Louis XIV gave Lully a monopoly on opera in 1673 this practice was drastically circumscribed. Actors protested politely at first, but Louis did not take the hint, so dramatists began to turn to their sharpest weapon: satire.

Operagoers were depicted as ridiculous losers, and operas as overblown and barbaric. Opera houses were portrayed as venues for illicit flirtation, and opera singers as people with questionable morals. Operas were said to bay at the moon, to have no new airs, and to employ monkeys instead of poets and musicians. While this derision had no apparent effect on the opera world, it gave French comedy a rich new subject.

This according to “Comedy versus opera in France, 1673–1700” by Henry Carrington Lancaster, an essay included in Essays and studies in honor of Carleton Brown (New York : New York University Press, 1940), which is covered in RILM’s recently-issued Liber Amicorum: Festschriften for music scholars and nonmusicians, 1840–1966.

Above, Gabriel Jacques de Saint-Aubin’s depiction of Lully’s  Armide as performed at the Palais-Royal in 1761.

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by | April 17, 2010 · 3:06 pm

Music of the spheres

A black hole situated in the center of a galaxy amid a group of thousands of galaxies collectively called the Perseus Cluster (shown above) emits waves in a frequency equivalent to a B♭ 57 octaves below middle C, or one million, billion times lower than the lowest sound audible to the human ear. The Perseus black hole’s sound waves have a frequency of 10 million years.

This information, from an article published online by NASA, resonates with the philosophical concept often associated with Pythagoras and Johannes Kepler of Musica universalis or music of the spheres.

Related Article: Spacecraft Voyager “Sounds of Earth” record cover

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by | April 6, 2010 · 12:18 pm

Rāgs and recipes

In “Why Hindustani musicians are good cooks: Analogies between music and food in North India” (Asian music XXV/1–2 (1993–94), pp. 69–80), Adrian McNeil notes that culinary topics are frequent—sometimes even favorite—subjects of conversation among Hindustani musicians, and that a notable number of top Indian musicians are also expert cooks. He attributes this phenomenon to the similarities between the cognitive and sensory aspects of the two activities, and proposes a “culinary perspective” on rāg.

Offering a basic “culinary recipe” alongside a basic “melodic recipe”, McNeil similarly juxtaposes, in a two-page spread, a photographic “depiction of potato with ginger and puris” with a rāgamālā “depiction of rāg sārant”. Further positing a “melodic conception of food”, he recounts examples of Indian musicians using culinary analogies to illustrate musical matters, and cites a use of the phrase biryāni chicken khā (eat chicken biryāni) to convey a rhythmic pattern to a hungry mrdangam player.

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by | March 31, 2010 · 11:34 am

Der travestirte Hamlet

Der travestirte Hamlet: Eine Burleske in deutschen Knittelversen mit Arien und Chören (1794) was one of several parodies that capitalized on the Hamlet fever that swept the German-speaking lands in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Karl Ludwig Giesecke wrote the play; the composer was not indicated, but there are grounds for believing that it was Vincenc Tuček (1773–1821).

The numbers include a song in which Polonius  coaches Ophelia on how to seduce Hamlet, a song in which Hamlet insists that he is not afraid of ghosts, and a duet for Hamlet and Ophelia at the end of the “get thee to a nunnery” scene. No one is killed in the play: Polonius avoids Hamlet’s rapier, Ophelia recovers her sanity, the poisoning is averted, and ultimately everyone goes out to drink wine together. The show ends with a choral finale and a contradance.

This according to “Some Viennese Hamlet parodies and a hitherto unknown musical score for one of them” by Peter Branscombe in Festschrift Otto Erich Deutsch zum 80. Geburtstag (Kassel : Bärenreiter, 1963), which is covered in RILM’s Liber Amicorum: Festschriften for music scholars and nonmusicians, 1840–1966.

Above, Edwin Booth as the Melancholy Dane, ca. 1870.

Related article: Comedy versus opera

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by | March 27, 2010 · 2:29 pm

Musical marksmanship

“Playing the piano with a rifle” in The Strand magazine 28 (December 1904, pp. 580–8) describes a performance by Colonel Gaston Bordeverry, who learned the intermezzo from Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana by ear and, having devised a system of bull’s-eyes to indicate the correct notes on a specially-built piano, performed the tune by firing 66 shots at the instrument with a rifle. The specially-made bullets were powderless and noiseless when they struck, which they did with enough force to pierce through a one–inch-thick plank.

Colonel Bordeverry and his daughter were variety show performers in the early twentieth century; his performance of the intermezzo was one of their most successful numbers. The article was reprinted as “Not the usual performance practice” in the American Musical Instrument Society newsletter 32/1 (Spring 2003, pp. 12–13, 16).

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